Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic and other applications. Semiconductor devices comprise, among other things, integrated circuits or discrete devices that are formed on semiconductor wafers by depositing one or more types of thin films of material over the semiconductor wafers, and patterning the thin films of material to form the integrated circuits.
There is a demand in semiconductor device technology to integrate many different functions on a single chip, e.g., manufacturing analog and digital circuitry on the same die. In such applications, large capacitors are extensively used for storing an electric charge. They are rather large in size, being several hundred micrometers wide depending on the capacitance, which is much larger than a transistor or memory cell. Consequently, such large capacitors occupy valuable silicon area increasing product cost. Such large capacitors are typically used as decoupling capacitors for microprocessor units (MPU's), RF capacitors in high frequency circuits, and filter and analog capacitors in mixed-signal products.
Thus, what are needed in the art are cost effective ways of forming semiconductor chips with increased functionality, good reliability, but without significant utilization of chip area.